Category Archives: guides and nudges

The Culture of Narcissism

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Book Recommendations, guides and nudges, Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno

So I am not a fan of Amanda Marcotte’s work, but as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Or in this case, close. Once.  Recently, Slate‘s resident “everything can be reduced to sexism” pundit wrote a post about why we shouldn’t find the video of the doofus asking Kate Upton to his prom charming, but yet another example of how the patriarchy teaches young men to be whistling cartoon wolves in zoot suits bent on total female subjugation, if not death. For Marcotte, this is just another brick in the wall of “the overall culture of male entitlement.” Well, she’s right about this episode revealing entitlement, but it has little to do with gender. This entitlement is the logical result of social networking culture’s amplification of one our shittiest human tendencies: our sense that we have any right to dictate how others feel about us. Genitals shmenitals.

To make this story all about patriarchal ills, Marcotte does not mention that this video proposal/demand has been directed at male celebrities too. Justin Timberlake was asked via YouTube to attend a Marine Corps ball and, unlike Upton, he agreed to go with his fan(atic). Now, maybe he actually wanted to do this, but if he didn’t, he really had no choice. If Timberlake had said no, he would have gotten slammed as anti-military, out of touch, and probably sexist for rejecting a woman with the “courage” to subvert gender norms by asking him out. In this sense, the stakes were a lot lower for Upton. No one really likes teenage boys, except maybe their mothers.

But I actually give Kate Upton a lot more credit than most celebrities who get put in this position. By (too) nicely saying no she reminded us of something we seem to have forgotten about as a culture. Just because you have Facebook and Twitter and follow celebrity accounts maintained by PR flacks does not mean you are actually friends with the people you worship. And no, you aren’t as worthy of their attention as they are of yours. They don’t pay to see you do anything. They don’t Google sexy pictures of you. They owe you nothing. And yet we applaud when some kid puts another human being in a really awkward spot in order to feed his own ego. Honestly, his parents should be ashamed. But I am sure they aren’t.

This sense of feeling like the objects of our affection owe us reciprocation is neither gendered nor new. The Greek gods and goddesses were constantly raping or turning the people they loved into animals or plants in order deal with the burn of rejection. Carrie Underwood had a hit song about fucking up some dude’s car for possibly cheating on her (listen to it, it’s all about things he’s “probably” doing). Obviously, I think it’s better that people don’t cheat on one another, but even in a committed relationship there is a limit to what we can do to those who disappoint us. If he cheats on you, Carrie, leave him. But leave his truck alone, you psychotic loser.

I recently finished reading two novels, Jeffrey Eugenides’s great The Marriage Plot, and Graham Greene’s middling England Made Me. Though published about 80 years apart, they are both about how, whether we want to admit it or not, loving someone else can often be a very selfish act. All three of the main characters in Eugenides’s book use each other to not have to admit their own selfishness. They are bright, urbane, and enlightened (Ivy Leaguers, dammit!), but they are terrified of being alone because then they’d realize that they are basically sad assholes. They want to be wanted and need to be needed. Most of us do, really. Greene’s book focuses on fraternal twins, a man and a woman, who are so in love with themselves that they try to sabotage each other’s relationships in order to preserve the possibility that they might make Quentin Compson’s deranged incestuous fantasies come to life. It’s not as creepy as it sounds because the book just isn’t, aside from a few incredible passages, very good, but watching the twins interact is about as comfortable as biting down on tinfoil.

If Eugenides and Green are warning against the dangers of self-obsession, this Kate Upton story is an example of how our social networking culture just encourages it. Far from being called out by an adult world with a sense of decency, this kid who asked her out was cheered on in his self-aggrandizing debasement by millions. He was on the fucking Today Show. No wonder kids are leaving college barely any smarter than when they arrive. Why work hard and take yourself away from fun when there’s a whole world (wide web) out there just waiting to make you a celebrity? All your friends are there. There’s Jay-Z, and A-Rod, and Marco Rubio, and Amanda Marcotte, and Kate Upton, and that kid who asked out Kate Upton…

All Roads Lead to Blog

Posted on by under American Masculinity, guides and nudges

It seems only fitting that on Easter weekend this old blog has risen from the dead. Jesus would be proud, I think. Like the owner and proprietor of these here parts, I finished my PhD in English in 2011, capping it off with a riveting study on American bachelorhood in mid-20th-century US fiction. The trade papers, as you might imagine, went nuts with anticipation and desire. I too had a blog back in the day, and you can find the remnants of it here. Like Ryan, I really enjoyed writing about Kanye West and Glenn Beck (remember him?) and the like. It’s sad for me to read the last few entries where I assure the reader that my infrequent posting is only temporary. I hate lying, especially when I am the one doing it. But this new venture excites me, as I was always a big fan of The General Reader. We’re here to make some hot copy, folks. Bank on it.

For my first post, then, I am going to keep things fresh and local. To quote a song I don’t even like very much, “the city I live in, the city of angels” figures prominently in my dissertation, and I am even more interested in the place now that I have time to be. The story of Los Angeles is a compressed and at times inverted version of American history where the founding fathers aren’t depressive racist philosopher kings, but ambitious racist Alger characters who looked at the post-Civil War, post-gold rush American landscape and figured out that if you control an area’s media and natural resources, and cut deals with the railroads, well then, baby, you’ve got a stew going. In a moral vacuum, it’s a fascinating tale, one ably documented by Kevin Starr, Mike Davis, Norman Klein, and Carey McWilliams (especially Carey McWilliams). If you are looking for a good primer before jumping into a tome, or just a way to be informed enough without reading, PBS did an excellent documentary on LA’s  original ruling clan, the Chandlers (no relation to Raymond). You will find a link to it below. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go draft a fantasy baseball team.

Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times

Can’t Keep a Good Blog Down

Posted on by under guides and nudges, in the news

All blogs go to heaven. Some come back from the dead.

Maybe God was like, “You have too many awesome posts left in you. Get back in there.” Maybe the rent was too high or it was crowded; maybe the co-op rejected your application. Maybe your book-length commentary on the later work of 2 Live Crew didn’t get posthumously picked up by that East Coast publisher, the one with the free bottled water, and you were steamed. Maybe you finished graduate school and decided this was more fun than a whole lot of academic life. Maybe you like the idea of running a website despite having no knowledge of basic coding or visual design or marketing.

My “maybe” is somewhere in there toward the end. In June of 2012, I finished a PhD in English; soon thereafter I remembered that keeping TGR updated was one of the most pleasurable aspects of my entire grad-school tour. That said, I don’t plan for this iteration of the Reader to be a solo job.

In the short term, The General Reader will be entirely online, and a small group of authors will produce it. It won’t have any sort of mission statement, genre affiliation, or well-defined lump of topical concerns, beyond the general aegis of Arts and Culture. And I mean generous: if you ever thought, “Man, wish there was a place to read about American literature, mid-shelf wines, rap music, sports, climate change, US and world politics & current affairs, yoga pants, gardening, urban planning, lyric poetry, YouTube comics, furniture, exercise regimes, Calvin and Hobbes, and midcentury film,” a crew of over-educated, plaid-shirted amateur genies just rolled up at your front door. No big deal. We do this for free.

Tell your friends.

Arts & Letters Daily

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

This is a website you would probably enjoy checking out two or three times a week.  It’s an efficient, diligently updated little compendium of the best new arts & culture journalism.  Recommended if you like thinking, books, music, politics, philosophy, sex, art, history, that sort of thing.  Speaking personally, I’m able to appear somewhat educated because I visit here.  It’s cheaper than a messenger bag.

-TGR

Prosody = Sexxxy

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Pooms/Poetry, Visual

We English teachers aren’t supposed to care about such things anymore, but fug it: knowing something about the basics of poetic form will enrich your understanding of poetry. In other words, it will make poetry more pleasurable for you. It’s like taking a basic music appreciation class and then going back and listening to records you already dug. Scansion is like dancing: it is all about learning how to follow the beat.

With this fact in mind, some good English Dept. folks at the University of Virginia (which I believe is the school Mr. Jefferson founded after he got his degree at my alma mater, William & Mary) have launched a wonderful new website for poetry nerds to waste time on. It’s called “For Better of Verse” (yeah, I hope you like puns, too), and in addition to an excellent glossary of poetic terms (teachers take note), it has a very, very cool interactive prosody widget. Doesn’t that sound fun?! Trust me, it is, even if you don’t think you care or need to know about iambs.

Using various canonical lyrics as well as passages from longer works–and I mean really canonical: it’s heavy on people like Milton and the Romantics, with some Yeats thrown in–the site allows you to practice your ability to spot the accents (i.e. the metrical emphases) and other key formal features in lines of poetry. The site will even “grade” your efforts.  Scansion is an imperfect technique, because it is often possible to place the accents in one line several different ways, and the whole deal might sound stuffy and academic at first, but trust me, this is like an addictive video game. Learning to scan “traditional” accentual poetry will in turn help you detect and savor the sonic features of “free verse”: once you can pick up the difference between, say, a trochee and an iamb, you will notice yourself paying more attention to things like internal rhyme, alliteration, and syllable counts, formal features which remain crucial to free verse, even though f.v. mostly dispenses with traditional meter. Scan away!

-TGR

The U.K. is killing its universities, too!

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

We know the script by now.  The putrefaction of the humanities.  The attempt to turn public institutions into for-profit adjuncts of the defense and telecom industries, overseen by wealthy philistines with the complexions of raw potatoes (Google “Mark Yudof”).  Increasing tuition matched by bigger, shoddier, haphazard lecture-hall “classes” where only the preternaturally determined learn anything.  From the symposium to the balance sheet.  The metastasis of bureaucracy, the general, mentally enfeebled, administrative top-heavyness.  And a public that, for the most part, just does not give a fuck.  I mean, what have universities ever done for civilization?

Anyway, the United Kingdom is accelerating its murder of education, albeit in a somewhat warmer fiduciary environment than California’s.  This article from the Times Literary Supplement explains the terrifying rise of Research Assessment Exercises, which are furthering the decay of humanities departments in British universities.  Yudof and his toadies need to step up their game: their fragmented, inarticulate, shambling, dark-of-wood-paneled-boardroom approach to destruction is simply less impressive, from a total strategic viewpoint, than the depraved efficiency of their Anglo counterparts.

-TGR